Tuesday, October 06, 2009

Ok, so I’m finally getting to giving ya’ll the play-by-play of our vacation. Not that you were dying to see it, but it gives me a good excuse to sort through the zillions of photos we took. Just imagine me hanging an old sheet on a wall, pulling out a projector and fiddling with a zillion tiny slides. It’s about that interesting.

We started off in Vancouver, Canada. It’s really a beautiful area, and there was lots of activity, as they are preparing for the 2010 Olympics.

Here’s the view from our hotel room. We saw a couple of cruise ships come and go from this port. Here’s us, with the snow-capped mountains behind us.Electronics Arts…the place all the fun games are created. This is outside of the new convention center that was built for the 2010 Winter Olympics. The convention center has grass growing on the roof. On purpose. It’s supposed to help reduce the carbon footprint. I think they’re just trying to see if the maintenance guy can mow on the roof.Looking across the river/bay to the other side of Vancouver. The clouds hung around the mountains all day. At Stanley Park, looking back toward the city. We biked around Stanley Park, which is on a peninsula, so it faces the bay on one side, the Pacific on the other. It was an 8.5km bike ride, and I don’t even want to try to figure out how many miles that is. I had a hard enough time with the thermostat. At Stanley Park. You can see Husband on the left. I chose not to display our close-up pictures…our bike helmets looked pretty lame. We definitely looked like tourists. But hey, it’s the law there that you have to wear a helmet while riding a bike. So maybe we looked like law-abiding citizens. Either way, we looked like dorks.Totem poles…they are everywhere! They are each carved out of a single tree. Still at Stanley Park, looking back toward the city. It was low tide, and we found that only one of the beaches was sandy like we are used to seeing. There are lots of big rocks and such…a harsh shoreline, for sure. It was kind of stinky, too.This is the bridge that goes over to the other part of Vancouver. It was designed by the same guy who designed the Golden Gate Bridge.The foliage in Stanley Park was beautiful. There were beautiful redwoods and some very interesting plants I’d never seen before. The climate there is very temperate, not at all what I expected. Summers average in the mid 80’s, winter in the 40’s. They don’t get much snow at all. In fact, we probably have more snow and cold weather than they do, which was pretty shocking to learn. So that’s about it for Vancouver. Next stop, Victoria, Canada.